Author Description

Michel Faber called A Father’s Affair “a whodunit of the heart, compelling, touching and peculiar.” Readers in Holland made it a bestseller, where it has topped over 250,000 copies to date. Critics and prize juries called it a winner, the recipient of the top Dutch literary award, the Generale Bank Prize. Now Canadian readers can enjoy this profound and wisely funny novel about the meaning of fatherhood, love and grief.A Father’s Affair is the story of Armin, a man who has just found out he is sterile, making it impossible for him and his partner Ellen to have a baby. That news might be devastating enough, but it turns out that Armin has always been infertile, also making it impossible that Bo, his 13-year-old son—whom he thought was conceived in the passenger seat of a yellow Renault—can be his biological son. Monika, Bo’s mother and Armin’s former partner, died tragically ten years ago, fueling the mystery of who Bo’s father really is. Memories of his beloved Monika suddenly ripped to pieces, Armin goes undercover into their shared past, trying to ferret out Bo’s real father from a short list of likely and unlikely suspects. Armin’s eventual discovery is the completely unexpected but brilliant climax to the story, a shocking ending that Karel van Loon handles with extraordinary sensitivity.A Father’s Affair is a novel that refuses to be categorized. By turns suspenseful, philosophical, erotic and exquisitely funny, its effortlessly constructed plot and detailed characters move together to create an extraordinary intersection of tender love story and compelling thriller.